In the patent document WO 98/57436 the concept of transposition was established as a method to recreate a high frequency band from a lower frequency band of an audio signal. A substantial saving in bitrate can be obtained by using this concept in audio coding. In an HFR based audio coding system, a low bandwidth signal, also referred to as the low frequency component of a signal, is presented to a core waveform coder, and the higher frequencies, also referred to as the high frequency component of the signal, are regenerated using signal transposition and additional side information of very low bitrate describing the target spectral shape of the high frequency component at the decoder side. For low bitrates, where the bandwidth of the core coded signal, i.e. the low band signal or low frequency component, is narrow, it becomes increasingly important to recreate a high band signal, i.e. a high frequency component, with perceptually pleasant characteristics. The harmonic transposition defined in the patent document WO 98/57436 performs well for complex musical material in a situation with low cross over frequency, i.e. in a situation of a low upper frequency of the low band signal. The principle of a harmonic transposition is that a sinusoid with frequency ω is mapped to a sinusoid with frequency Tω, where T>1 is an integer defining the order of the transposition, i.e. the transposition order. In contrast to this, a single sideband modulation (SSB) based HFR maps a sinusoid with frequency ω to a sinusoid with frequency ω+Δω, where Δω is a fixed frequency shift. Given a core signal with low bandwidth, i.e. a low band signal with a low upper frequency, a dissonant ringing artifact will typically result from the SSB transposition, which may therefore be disadvantageous compared to harmonic transposition.
In order to reach improved audio quality and in order to synthesize the required bandwidth of the high band signal, harmonic HFR methods typically employ several orders of transposition. In order to implement a plurality of transpositions of different transposition order, prior art solutions require a plurality of filter banks either in the analysis stage or the synthesis stage or in both stages. Typically, a different filter bank is required for each different transposition order. Moreover, in situations where the core waveform coder operates at a lower sampling rate than the sampling rate of the final output signal, there is typically an additional need to convert the core signal to the sampling rate of the output signal, and this upsampling of the core signal is usually achieved by adding yet another filter bank. All in all, the computationally complexity increases significantly with an increasing number of different transposition orders.